original gravity for Ward's in the war years was 1030 o.g.
Worse of all breweries had been requested to brew less beer
as well as being compelled to use poorer quality base
ingredients - Excise duty too had climbed ever higher to
raise further money for the costly war effort.

The nature of Foxearth remained; a new world nodding
with familiarities of the old. The census of 1921 shows that
the population was not tempted away from the village by
higher wages abroad or in far-flung towns and cities and
the brewery was very much the king-pin in that.

It was a dark age. David Ward could have reacted by
embalming the business in a nostalgic light but instead set
about issuing a series of challenges to himself and his
workforce. New patterns of production were formed that
would shape the future of the brewery for the next two
decades.

When Elizabeth Foster died the following spring, the
long, close and active interest the Foster’s had given to the
parish, the Ward family and the brewery, was all but over.
The identification of the church with its middle-class
values, with the family, the community and a safe form of
patriotism was alive that day - funerals were one of the few
areas of village life where members of different classes
socialised  together  and  school  children,  shopkeepers,
brewery employees, the landed gentry and practically
everyone from the village lined Lime Walk in serried rows
and streamed through into the church.

Part of this new approach involved becoming a public
limited company following tight profit margins and one
year where David had been forced to put much of his own
money into the business in order to balance the books. In
June 1919 the ambitious moment arrived with David and
his son Harold becoming directors of the new firm called
Wards Limited, they floated the company and issued forty
thousand shares at one pound a share; money which they
used to expand their portfolio of cottages, land and expand
the brewery buildings. That same year the company brewed
13, 617 barrels - an incredible achievement given the
extremely difficult circumstances in which they were
operating in and an increase of six hundred barrels
immediately before the outbreak of war.

David Ward, now as a member of the family, helped to
bear Elizabeth’s coffin as it was laid beside that of her dead
husband.  Sarah Newman, the girl who had accused John
Foster of raping her and whom Elizabeth had found a
position in London, stood by her graveside and wept. 32

industrial  decline  in  the  mid-1920s  with  rising
unemployment and social bitterness that led to the worst

explosion of class conflict Britain had yet known, failed to
harm the brewery’s renewed profits even though the price
of a pint had risen to an astronomical 7d.

No action more effectively expressed the mood of
renewed optimism than strengthening their captive trade
which they did by buying up further licensed premises. The
brewery’s estate of the early 1920s included: 21 licensed
houses and 15 various clubs and off-licences under the
Ward’s stewardship. Part of their retail estate incorporated
the business of retail brewer George Frederick Grice at the
Cock and Bell public house, Long Melford. At that year’s
annual Brewer’s Exhibition, Wards Limited walked away
with the show’s highest honours by winning a gold medal
for their new Burton Ale as well as collecting a silver medal
for their Imperial Double Brown.

This can partly be put down to David Ward’s inner radar
knowing that the future success of his business relied on a
co-dependent and happy workforce. The extension of his
charity to local people was a crucial ingredient to the
brewery’s continued prosperity. Acts of kindness were not

 There was an insatiable demand for country girls as
servants; they were considered more pliable and trustworthy than
town girls.